Hemispherectomy for intractable unihemispheric epilepsy (IUE) has long been established in pediatric patients. This study reports the first series examining hemispherectomy exclusively in adult patients (>18 years old). Nine adults with IUE underwent hemispherectomy at the University of Minnesota. All patients had unilateral hemiplegia and visual field loss. Seven patients (77.8%) were Engel cl...

Hemimegalencephaly (HME) is a rare disorder of cortical development with overgrowth of one cerebral hemisphere. Patients have intellectual delay, hemiparesis and severe epilepsy. Drug-resistant epilepsy is often treated with a hemispherectomy. We review the literature on HME natural history and report a 26-year-old man with HME who did not undergo hemispherectomy in childhood with recurrent foc...

A case of Sturge-Weber disease treated with left hemispherectomy presented, 11 years later, with complications related to delayed intracranial haemorrhage. A loculation syndrome of the right lateral ventricle was detected and it was corrected by a ventriculoatrial shunt operation. The side of the hemispherectomy was evacuated of all the chronic products of haemorrhage, including the subdural me...

The development of hemispherectomy for glioma (mostly in adults) by Dandy (1928) and later for infantile hemiplegia by Krynauw (1950) permitted comparisons of effects of removal of either hemisphere on both the adult and young brain. Reviews of over 300 cases of hemispherectomy (e.g., White, 1961; McFie, 1961) reflect the 'functional plasticity' of the young brain. Continuing development of hig...

− Twelve patients suffering from intractable epilepsy and presenting with radiological evidence of diffuse hemispheric involvement of a dysplastic process, were treated by disconnective hemispherectomy, either functional hemispherectomy or peri-insular hemispherotomy. The median age at surgery was 4.5 years old and the interval between seizure onset and surgery, 3 years. All patients underwent ...

We examined two commonly used dichotic listening tests for measuring the degree of hemispheric specialization for language in individuals who had undergone cerebral hemispherectomy: the consonant-vowel (CV) nonsense syllables and the fused words (FW) tests, using the common laterality indices f and lambda. Hemispherectomy on either side resulted in a massive contralateral ear advantage, demonst...

Twelve patients suffering from intractable epilepsy and presenting with radiological evidence of diffuse hemispheric involvement of a dysplastic process, were treated by disconnective hemispherectomy, either functional hemispherectomy or peri-insular hemispherotomy. The median age at surgery was 4.5 years old and the interval between seizure onset and surgery, 3 years. All patients underwent a ...

Hemispherectomy is effective for young patients suffered from unilateral cortical disease and severe drug-resistant epilepsy, but a major concern for hemispherectomy is the remaining brain functions and function recovery in patients after such surgery. In this study, seven patients were evaluated with clinical and imaging assessment pre- and post-surgery. Among them, four underwent anatomic hem...

BACKGROUND The insular cortex is not routinely removed in modified functional hemispherectomy due to the risk of injury to the main arteries and to deep structures. Our study evaluates the safety and usefulness of applying intraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) on the insular during the hemispherectomy. METHODS We included all patients who underwent insular ECoG during a modified function...

Hemispherectomy is an established neurosurgical procedure for unilateral refractory epilepsy . Even though the surgical approach has evolved greatly, prevention of catastrophic intraoperative bleeding is a challenge. It is important that surgeons know the abnormal blood vessel before surgery. Herein, we report our experience with two patients in whom computed tomographic angiography (CTA) was u...